Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Kenyans should answer the ethnic question

By LUKOYE ATWOLI
Sunday Nation 20 May 2012

Lately, the National Cohesion and Integration
Commission (NCIC) has been in the news discussing the ethnic composition
of various national entities and arguing for redistribution to show the
‘face of Kenya’.
Their mandate is derived from the National
Cohesion and Integration Act as well as from the Constitution, which
requires that all public institutions demonstrate an ethnic balance in
their staff complement to prevent any one ethnic community from
dominating positions in government.

All these measures were
informed by a historical view that previously in this country, election
or appointment into public office resulted in an ethnic feasting orgy,
where all jobs were allegedly distributed among village-mates and
friends of the individual wielding the power. These measures were legislated to attempt to redress the imbalance and prevent similar occurrences in future.

Additionally,
the NCIC has developed a draft Ethnic and Race Relations Policy
document and circulated it for discussion, providing guidelines on how
Kenya should eventually become a more ethnically integrated society. Numerous
policy statements in this document address diverse issues from the
national language to the production of periodic reports on ethnic and
racial diversity.

In this regard, the NCIC has done a commendable
job and it behoves all Kenyans to interrogate this draft policy and make
suggestions on how it can be improved. However, the NCIC
currently labours under the somewhat comical tag of ‘national tribal
monitor’ that has only busied itself with counting members of ethnic
communities in public institutions. It will be necessary for the
Commission to shed this comical image if anyone is to take its
pronouncements seriously.

For instance, recently, the commission
required all public institutions to provide information on the ethnic
composition of their workforce. This was done without providing
any guidelines on how this would be done and what parameters would be
used to determine ethnicity.

The result is that many institutions
simply went into their human resource records and used the surnames of
their employees to deduce their tribes without further consultation. The
resulting report has been dismissed by some observers as ‘shallow’ and
ill-thought out, and nobody seems to be taking it too seriously.

Another
example of the nonsensical nature of this type of tribal census arose
during interviews for the Gender Commission, where some applicants were
denied positions based on their assumed ethnicity.
An applicant
with Kamba, Kikuyu and Luhya heritage was locked out on the basis that
her ‘tribe’ was already over-represented in other commissions. Her argument that nobody had asked her what she considered to be her ethnicity was dismissed as being merely academic.

It
is therefore commendable that the NCIC has recognised that one’s ethnic
heritage can only be determined by asking them, and has provided for
‘self-identification’ as the key method of ethnic identification.

There
is an unintended positive outcome to this approach. If we are all
honest with ourselves, at the next census most Kenyans will identify
themselves as either ‘multi-ethnic’ or simply ‘Kenyan’. It is
conceivable that entirely new categories of ethnicity will arise,
leading to a situation where it will no longer make sense to conduct an
ethnic survey of employment practices in public and private
institutions.

Hopefully this will also eliminate the all-important
‘tribal arithmetic’ from the calculations of our ethno-political
demagogues as they plan their next election strategy.

Dr
Lukoye Atwoli is the secretary, Kenya Psychiatric Association and
lecturer at Moi University’s School of Medicine lukoye@gmail.com;
Twitter: @lukoyeatwoli